When Friends Become Foes

 

“The righteous choose their friends carefully, but the way of the wicked leads them astray.”

—Proverbs 12:26

Have you ever had a friend who seemed to always get you into trouble? Maybe as a young child you had a friend who dared you to do something that put you in danger. Or, maybe you had a group of friends that engaged in questionable activities and you found yourself going along, even though you realized that by following their lead you were placing yourself in possible peril.

Most of us hope that by the time we reach adulthood we have put those kind of friends behind us. But, the truth is that sometimes we fall under the influence of friends who lead us in a direction that is all the more dangerous than those perils of our childhood.

In a former church, I became aware of a group of four young mothers who met together at least once a week intending to share the joys and trials of their marriages and child rearing. They seemed to form a natural support group. However, over time their too-intimate sharing ended up putting one or more of the group in danger.

As they became closer in their relationship with each other, they began to share details of their marriages and even of their thought life that revealed too much about their husbands, their own feelings about each one’s love life, and other very intimate details of their lives. As a result, they developed a co-dependent enabling relationship with each other that ultimately led three out of the four members of the group to begin affairs and eventually divorce their unsuspecting spouses.

Without the mutual encouragement to make wrong choices, it is quite possible that these women would never have gone down the pathway they chose to pursue. Instead of helping each other grow in their relationships with the Lord Jesus Christ, their mutual sharing led them to abandon their commitment to Christ and pursue short-lived pleasure.

There was no happy endings to their stories. The three who got divorced eventually each got another divorce from the man with whom they had cheated on their husbands. And, those third husbands ended up cheating on each of their new wives. One of the four ended up seriously addicted to prescription pain killers. Another of the four committed suicide when the children she had abandoned to pursue a life of pleasure refused to have anything to do with her.

It’s quite possible that you and I might make bad choices when it comes to picking our friends and we would not end up in such dire straits as the women in my illustration. But, our lives will be impacted negatively by choosing friends who point us away from Christ.

King Solomon offered wise words when he wrote in Proverbs 12:26:

The righteous choose their friends carefully,
but the way of the wicked leads them astray.

Let’s examine our friendships and make certain that our chosen friends are helping us move forward along the road to Christian maturity. If we have made questionable choices, let’s reverse those decisions and seek relationships with people who are truly like-minded and willing to cheer us along the pathway that God has laid out before us.

 

_{Copyright © 2014 by Dean K. Wilson. All Rights Reserved.}

_{More info at www.DeanKWilson.com}